Scalable IP-VPN Flow Control Mechanism

In recent years, IP-based virtual private networks (IP-VPNs), which provide a virtual privately owned network over an IP network, have attracted attention. With existing IP-VPNs, however, there is a serious problem that fairness among IPVPN customers is not satisfied. In our previous work, we have proposed an IP-VPN fairness control mechanism called I2VFC (Interand Intra-VPN Fairness Control) that realizes fairness among IP-VPN customers. In this paper, we quantitatively show effectiveness of our I2VFC using simulation experiments and prototype system experiments. Focusing on inter-VPN fairness, intra-VPN fairness, and scalability, we extensively analyze the performance of I2VFC. Consequently, we show that I2VFC can realize both interand intra-VPN fairness under diverse control parameter configurations, indicating robustness and parameter insensitivity of our I2VFC. We also show that I2VFC has a practically sufficient scalability in terms of the transfer speed and the number of VPNs accommodated. For instance, measurement results using our prototype system show that with a modern desktop computer, I2VFC can support approximately 1.6 [Gbit/s] bandwidth and 1,300 numbers of VPNs.